The Phytometasyn Project (http://www.phytometasyn.ca)

Written by Ye Zhang

The Phytometasyn project (http://www.phytometasyn.ca) investigate s target metabolic pathways in 75 different plant species with the goal to replicate them in yeast.  The platform provides bioinformatics support to identify genes from these plants that can catalyze the synthesis of potentially important chemical compounds. De novo transcriptome assemblies for species of interest are generated from high throughput 454 and Illumina sequencing data through a hybrid assembly pipeline utilizing the most up to date assembly software.  Platform bioinformatics accelerator hardware are utilized to perform HMM based searches for extensive annotation of assembled datasets.  The MAGPIE / Sprockets environment performs functional annotation, hierarchical clustering and generation of gene family models while providing a web interface for user access. The platform also investigates approaches to using next-gen sequencing data for comparative expression analysis as well as the integration/mapping of metabolomic to transcriptomic data